Amazing Stories Launches Blog

Steve Davidson, The Crotchety Old Fan and impresario of the revived Amazing Stories, unveiled the new Amazing Stories blog on January 21.

Sixty fans, authors, artists, editors and bloggers will be contributing articles on science fiction, fantasy and horror literature and its presence in all media.

All contents of Amazing Stories are free. Membership is also free: members may participate in the discussion, share information and engage in many other familiar social networking activities.

The members of the Amazing Stories Blog Team are: Cenobyte, Karen G. Anderson, Mike Brotherton, Ricky L. Brown, Michael A. Burstein, Catherine Coker, Johne Cook, Paul Cook, Gary Dalkin, Jane Frank, Adria K. Fraser,  Jim Freund, Fran Friel, Adam Gaffen, Chris Garcia, Chris Gerwel, Tommy Hancock, Liz Henderson, Samantha Henry, M.D. Jackson, Monique Jacob, Geoffrey James, J. Jay Jones, Daniel M. Kimmel, Peggy Kolm, Justin Landon, Andrew Liptak, Bob Lock, Melissa Lowery, Barry Malzberg, C. E. Martin, Farrell J. McGovern, Steve Miller, Matt Mitrovich, Aidan Moher, Kevin Murray, Ken Neth, Astrid Nielsch, D. Nicklin-Dunbar, James Palmer, John Purcell, James Rogers, Felicity Savage, Diane Severson, Steve H Silver, J. Simpson, Douglas Smith, Lesley Smith, Bill Spangler, Duane Spurlock, Michael J. Sullivan, G. W. Thomas, Erin Underwood, Stephan Van Velzen, Cynthia Ward, Michael Webb, Keith West, John M. Whalen, Karlo Yeager, and Leah A. Zeldes.

Amazing Hits the Road

Over the next few weeks The Crotchety Old Fan, Steve Davidson, will attend two Boston cons, Arisia (January 13-16) and Boskone (February 17-19), drumming up interest in the relaunch of Amazing Stories and campaigning for the Orlando in 2015 Worldcon bid.

If you’re there, drop by his table and say hi. You’ll find Steve near a big poster of this faux cover of the first issue:

 

The real first cover for the new Amazing Stories will be prepared by Hugo-winning artist Frank Wu.

Crotchety is Amazing

Steve Davidson (The Crotchety Old Fan/The Classic Science Fiction Channel) received notice on September 28 that his application for a trademark for Amazing Stories has been granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Davidson explains:

Amazing Stories has had a rocky history, stumbling along through bankruptcy (when Gernsback lost ownership), through a series of publishers and editors – Teck Publications, Ziff-Davis, Ultimate (where it enjoyed a brief and all too short resurgence under the tutelage of Ted White), Dragon Publications and, through a series of corporate buy-outs, ended up as a Hasbro (toys) property and licensed to Paizo Publications, which re-introduced it as a mass-media/geek culture mag until its demise in 2005.

By 2007, Hasbro had abandoned the trademark. Davidson, who was managing the intellectual property department of an R&D firm at the time, routinely reviewed the status of some favorite marks. Noting the lapse for Amazing Stories, he filed an application for the Mark in 2008.

Davidson aspires to revive it as an online magazine.

The full press release follows the jump.

Continue reading

Not So Blue Monday

The Crotchety Old Fan sure was crotchety today,  cheering Avatar’s loss at the Oscars.

What especially intrigued me was his reminder that an sf movie has already won an Oscar for Best Picture.    

Back in 1956, Around The World In 80 Days took best picture. Does anyone need a reminder that the movie (with David Niven) was based on the novel by JULES VERNE?  and that the novel itself was just as much a speculative fiction of speculative technologies when written as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was?       

Hey, that’s right! Now tell me, am I allowed to call something “steampunk” if it was written when steam power was the state-of-the-art technology?  

Crotchety adds that a mythopoeic fantasy film has already won Best Picture, too. It’ll come to you in a moment. Or if it doesn’t check his little list of genre nominees to jog your memory.

Strangely Familiar

The Crotchety Old Fan’s site is well on its way to recovering from the depredations of several hijackers. What he’s learned is worth reading.

Crotchety’s sense of humor is back, too, as he shows in a post about two characters’ conversation about science fiction in a Riverworld novel by Philip Jose Farmer.

And at the moment, Crotchety’s blog is looking strangely familiar because he’s using WordPress’ default “Kubrick” theme, the same one I’ve relied on since the beginning.

A Lot To Be Humble About

Diana told me about Website Grader and I had it evaluate this blog.

The File 770 blog received a grade of 69. That didn’t sound bad. It also “ranked 610,807 of the 1,785,826 websites that have been ranked so far.” Now I was feeling pretty proud of myself. But you know what pride goeth before.

Website Grader can run comparisons between your site and any competitors, just fill in the URL. So I thought for a moment about who pays attention to some of the topics I follow.  The Crotchety Old Fan came to mind because I had just read his very funny automated “sf is dying/dead” blog entry (there are so many lately that he wanted to save everyone the bother of thinking up any more so they could get back to writing things he did want to read.)

When Website Grader took a look at Crotchety Old Fan an alarm must have gone off in the front office so all the executives could gather around the screen and see what a real sf site is supposed to look like. My gosh. The Crotchety Old Fan received a grade of 95.3. His site has 495 Google Indexed Pages while File 770 has…none. My site has 235 inbound links. Crotchety’s has 16,973!

I wonder if he gives lessons.